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That may sound straightforward, but Cohen said there are a number of potential stumbling blocks. One of them involves testing a product with people who aren’t representative of its actual potential customer base. That might happen when resource-strained start-ups rely on friends and family for testing. Not only might those people not be representative of potential customers, but they also might be unwilling to give the sort of candid feedback an entrepreneur needs, out of a desire to not hurt anyone’s feelings.

Cohen stressed the importance of easy “on-boarding,” which refers to the process by which a user begins to use a product, whether it’s a website or a piece of software. On-boarding, he said, should be easy and intuitive. If a product has a lot of advanced or sophisticated features, designers shouldn’t overwhelm users with them at the beginning, but instead, they should allow them to be discovered gradually as the product gets used.

He suggested a design philosophy of: Keep it simple, with a dagger preferred to a Swiss army knife. “Simplicity can be the biggest feature in and of itself,” he said. “Don’t ruin it.”

No Time Like the Present

One of Cohen’s themes during his talk was that there is no time like the present to create a start-up. The availability of free or low-cost web tools to help with the product development process is one of the main reasons for that being true, said Cohen. In fact, he added, the costs involved with starting a company have declined so much that venture capitalists are beginning to become concerned about what role they will play in the technology industry of the future.

“There really is a tectonic shift underway,” Cohen stated. “Software has become easy and cheap to build.” He added that because the barriers to entry are dropping, the marketplace will likely become increasingly crowded with competitors.

Cohen also discussed some of the growing number of web tools tailored for entrepreneurs.

A product called Lean Canvas, for example, provides a blueprint that lets entrepreneurs see if their overall approach is following lean principles. Balsamiq provides an easy way to create a prototype version of a software product to test it out on users, he said. Other easily available web products that Cohen recommended include Jira, which implements what has come to be called the Agile development methodology, and GitHub, a central repository for the computer code that programmers write in the process of bringing a product to market.

Cohen also noted the popularity of sites such as eLance and oDesk, which allow start-ups to hire highly trained professional help on a per-project basis, often at a fraction of what it would cost to bring on a full-time person. Some sites are highly specialized, such as uTest, which allows for crowd-sourced debugging of software code. There is even a site called FounderDating, where entrepreneurs looking to fill out a start-up team can find potential partners.

According to Cohen, the composition of the ideal start-up team starts with the CEO, who should have a strong background in product management. Also necessary, he added, are founders with extensive know-how in technology and user experience. If not all of those boxes can be checked right away, he noted, members of the founding team may need to serve dual roles on an interim basis until a spot can be filled full-time.

Examples that Cohen gave of companies that did everything right include Mint, which has become popular for personal finance and was acquired by Quicken, and Dropbox, the file sharing site. Cohen admitted to being a huge fan of Dropbox, calling it a “massively successful lean product” and praising the company for not making it more complex as the service became more popular. “I respect those guys a lot,” he said.

While describing the lists of dos and don’ts that entrepreneurs should follow, Cohen also noted the irony of the fact that some of the most successful entrepreneurs have been those who broke all the rules. The paradigmatic example, he said, was Steve Jobs.

Apple, noted Cohen, never did any of the things it was “supposed” to: It didn’t listen to customers, and it introduced finished products all at once, rather than gradually releasing revised versions. But Cohen added that in addition to the presence of Steve Jobs, Apple also had resources that most start-ups lack, like a hefty marketing budget that allowed the company to nearly bury the country in billboards promoting products like the iPod and the iPad.

Said Cohen, “Apple is a unique and rare case, one that is very hard to duplicate.”